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Sovereign States
Holy Realm of Hinomoto
Capital: Kamigami no Toshi
Government: Theocratic Absolute Elective Monarchy
Head of State: Saikojuso
Head of Government: Saikojuso
Legislature: Council of 16 Preists
Demonym: Hinomoto
Currency: Hansatsu, Koban, Nibuban, Ichibuban, Tsuho
The Holy Realm of Hinomoto (日乃本の神聖国土/Hinomoto no Shinsei Kokudo) is a theocratic nation occupying the half-tropical/half-arid island of the same name in the southern waters of the Oriental sea. It shares maritime borders with Yamatai to the north, Mizuho to the northwest and Ningyo Kazan to the southeast. The northern half of the island is mostly tropical, while the southern half is mostly arid desert.
The island has been home to many indigenous clans and tribes since ancient times, and Genjin settlers had been coming to the island for centuries. Hinomoto was already a powerful nation that was dominant in the north of the island before the Two Hundred Years' War, but modern Hinomoto began when exiles fleeing war during the early stages of the conflicts came to the island for asylum. The nation was reformed into the Holy Realm, and has since extended its rule across the entire island and much of the smaller surrounding islands.
A deeply religious nation, Hinomoto was founded on the belief that the island was the birthplace of the supreme kami Zenno-sha & Kanno-teki and the Idainaryu.
Despite – or perhaps because of – its religious nature, it has been known for political instability due to religious strife, and has broken into separate states and civil war more than once.
Hinomoto is ruled by the Saikojuso (最高住僧) – fem. Saikomiko (最高巫女) – an holy title that also denotes the second of the entire Mioshie religion. The title is elective, only voted on upon the death of the previous title holder. Below the Saikojuso is the Council of 16 Priests (十六の宮司会議/Juroku no Guji Kaigi), sixteen individuals who represent the sixteen Kyoku (教区) of Hinomoto.
While Yamatai conquered most of Fuso in its quest to unify the great lands, the empire didn't dare try to conquer Hinomoto. The rationale for sparing Hinomoto from invasion was that no one wished or dared to upset the kami.
Kingdom of Mizuho
Government: Hereditary Absolute Feudal Monarchy
Head of State: Osho
Head of Government: Osho
Legislature: High Council
Demonym: Mizuhese
Currency: Hansatsu, Koban, Nibuban, Ichibuban, Tsuho
The Kingdom of Mizuho (瑞穂) is a multi-island monarchical nation in the Oriental sea, occupying the Eda Archipelago, a branch archipelago of Fuso, just off the west coast of Yumiya-shima (弓矢島), land of the Yamato Empire. It shares maritime borders with Yamatai to the east and Hinomoto to the southeast. Throughout history there has been some debate over whether or not the archipelago is part of Fuso, but modern cartographers indeed classify it as such.
Mizuho is the only remaining state from the Fourteen Kingdoms Period. The northern island of Mizuho was once territory of the Kingdom of Heiya, another state of the Fourteen Kingdoms Period, before seceding into an independent nation under the rule of the Tsukahara clan, a cadet-branch of the Shimazu clan. When the Warring States Period of the the Two Hundred Years' War broke out, Mizuho managed to avoid falling apart and stayed out of the conflicts of the main body of Fuso for the duration of the wars until the Age of Conquest.
The southern islands were once ruled by a separate dynasty, the Kingdom of Umi-Iwa, another state of the Fourteen Kingdoms Period, and the two kingdoms were constantly engaged in a struggle for dominance, to the point of war more than once. When the Two Hundred Years' War broke out, the two sides engaged in a near perpetual state of war; but, just as the Age of Conquest began, these conflicts ended when two royals from the north and south fell in love and married, resulting not only peace, but the permanent union of the two dynasties.
When the new Empire of Yamatai secured the eastern side of Yumiya, it tried to invade Mizuho, but Mizuho put up a steadfast resistance and Yamatai was repulsed. The empire was eventually forced to sign a peace treaty with Mizuho so that they could turn their attentions to the rest of Yumiya and Fuso.
During the final stages of the Age of Conquest, Yamatai again tried to assert dominance over Mizuho by conquest, but Mizuho had anticipated the return of Yamato forces and were prepared to mount a stern defense. Eventually, the costly conflict forced Yamatai to sign yet another peace treaty with Mizuho, ending the Age of Conquest period of the wars, and the Two Hundred Years' War.
The Kingdom of Mizuho has remained under the rule of the Tsukahara clan to this day. Despite permanent peace within its borders, Mizuho has remained a rival of Yamatai, and the latter has threatened its sovereignty several times in a variety of way since the conclusion of the Two Hundred Years' War.
Kingdom of Ningyo Kazan
Government: Elective Feudal Monarchy
Head of State: Kuni-o
Head of Government: Sessei
Legislature: Sanshikan (Council of Three)
Demonym: ????
Currency: Hansatsu, Koban, Nibuban, Ichibuban, Tsuho
The Kingdom of Ningyo Kazan (人魚火山) is an multi-island nation occupying the volcanic archipelago of the same name. It shares maritime borders solely with Hinomoto to the north. Despite the islands' close proximity to Hinomoto, there was some debate for centuries over whether of not the islands are actually part of Fuso, but modern cartographers classify it as part of the whole.
Being a country on volcanic islands, like the majority of islands in Oriental sea, Ningyo Kazan has the most fertile soil anywhere on Qirsyllviar, and is home to a vast network of caves many consider the most spiritual anywhere. But what makes the country most special is the coexistence between humans and merpeople, similar to Renyu Dao in southeast Marlakcor.
Empire of Yamatai
Government: Hereditary Parliamentary Absolute Feudal Monarchy
Head of State: Tenno
Heads of Government: Tenno & Daijo-daijin
Legislature: Gikai
Demonym: Yamato (屋魔徒)
Currency: Hansatsu, Koban, Nibuban, Ichibuban, Tsuho
The Empire of Yamatai (屋魔鯛), also called the Yamato Empire (屋魔徒帝国/Yamato Teikoku), is a large monarchical island nation in the Oriental sea (known to the Genjin peoples as the Seibu sea), occupying most of the large archipelagic lands and islands of Fuso. It shares maritime borders with Mizuho to the southwest, and Hinomoto to the south. It also holds sovereignty over swaths of territory in Marlakcor (the Morokoshi Ryoiki), the islands of Akantai to the northwest, and the Kappa Islands in Maritymir.
Yamatai is ruled by the Idai dynasty, control of which has passed through three successive clans via scions of the same dynasty over a course of almost three thousand years, with only a handful of interregnums.
What became modern Yamatai was once only a small independent fiefdom, known as Owari, ruled by the daimyo (patriarch/matriarch) of the Oda clan, on the southeast shore of the northernmost of the three great islands.
Before age of Yamatai, or even the first tenno, the lands and islands of Fuso was divided between hundreds of regional daimyos, samurai and Osho (王将/Kings) competing and warring with each other for land and hegemony.
About two thousand years before the Two Hundred Years' War, out of nowhere, during what history calls Akagane Jidai (赤金時代/Copper Age), a figure known to history as Keiken no Taiso (敬虔の太祖), declared himself supreme ruler of all as the first Tenno (天皇/Emperor) in Fuso's history, creating what he named the Idai (偉大) dynasty. The high priests of the time claimed him be a descendant of a the supreme kami sent by his divine ancestor to unite world and hold supreme power over the lands. After several years of persuasion, and several wars, the various osho, samurai and daimyo pledged allegiance one after another over a period of at least thirty years. From then on, Fuso was nominally ruled by the tenno. However, the power of the tenno was always questionable.
For a time, the tenno truly held supreme power over Fuso and all answered to him. But, as time went by, the power of the tenno waned until everything was as it was before Tenno Taiso. While the daimyos, samurai and osho nominally proclaimed allegiance to the tenno, the tenno ruled only the imperial capital and the surrounding territory at best and true power over the lands remained in the hands of the daimyos, samurai and osho, who continued to compete and war with each other for hegemony, and the tenno were near powerless to do anything. Only a few daimyo, samurai and osho truly ever held any loyalty to the tenno. The tenno's role in time became purely ceremonial while the daimyo, samurai and osho did as they pleased, and it was almost like the tenno didn't exist.
By the time Fuso was divided into fourteen states in what was known as the Fourteen Kingdoms Period (十四王国時代/Jushi Okoku Jidai) (c. 3200AFZ – 3631), these fourteen kingdoms, which were rarely ever at peace with one another, were still under nominal hegemony of the tenno. By that time – roughly 2100 years after the enthronement of the first tenno – the tenno was generally the peacekeeper of Fuso and was highly respected and revered, but in practice still held little-to-no actual power. This period ended when Keiken no Hayashi-tenno was assassinated in an internal power struggle that was intended to restore power to the tenno. The coup backfired and most of the direct imperial family was killed in the same incident, leaving the heir to the imperial throne uncertain.
With each of the fourteen osho suspecting each other of taking part in the atrocity, and the more ambitious of every major daimyo and samurai sensing and seizing opportunity, rebellions and war ensued and most of the fourteen kingdoms collapsed entirely. And so the lands and islands of Fuso were plunged into chaos of near perpetuate war, even the eventual enthronement of Keiken no Kyuseishu-tenno did nothing to quell the chaos, the authority of the tenno reduced to nothing and the position reduced to merely an almost-obsolete symbol.
Thus the Fourteen Kingdoms Period ended, setting the stage for the Warring States Period (戦国時代/Sengoku Jidai)(c. 3631AFZ – 3739) of the Two Hundred Years' War (二百年戦争/Ni Hyakunen Senso )(c. 3631AFZ – 3840/1914IIO – 2123).
Owari was one of many states that rose to de facto independence after the collapse and breakup of great states of the Fourteen Kingdoms Period.
In the latter half of the Two Hundred Years' War, a cadet branch of the Oda (織田) clan rose to prominence under the leadership of Oda Yoshishige, a scion of the Oda and the Keiken clan; first uniting a divided clan and subjugating its closest enemies. Those successful actions, along with the eventual conquest of the former Kingdom of Shinrin and the imperial capital, Daitoshi, and the abdication of Keiken no Saigo-tenno to Yoshishige, began the Age of Conquest (征服時代/Seifuku Jidai)(3739AFZ – 3840) and led to the founding of the Empire of Yamatai under the rule of a new line of tenno descended from the old one, thus maintaining the Idai dynasty. This was also the first time in some millennia the tenno held any real power over the lands.
The Yamato Empire under Yoshishige – posthumous name: Shintoki-tenno (新時天皇) – and his descendants eventually conquered all its rivals and the rest of Yamatai during the Age of Conquest, through a combination of force and diplomacy, eventually becoming the sole governing authority of the empire. The sole exception to this is the Kingdom of Mizuho, the only remaining state from the Fourteen Kingdoms Period. Twice during the Age of Conquest did Yamatai tried to conquer Mizuho, and twice Mizuho repelled the invasions.
In the seven centuries since the conclusion of the Age of Conquest, rulership Yamatai since passed to a cadet branch of the larger Toyotomi (豊臣) clan.
Roughly two hundred years before present day, a cadet branch of the Toyotomi clan came to power, via a branch that was descended from Yoshishige, following the assassination of the twentieth Oda tenno. The first Toyotomi tenno of the Idai dynasty was Toyotomi Nobunaga (信長豊臣). Nobunaga was a great-grandson of a previous Oda tenno of the Idai dynasty – Suisho-tenno (水晶天皇) – personal name: Mitsuyasu (光泰) – via his daughter Mutsumi Naishinno (六ツ美) – and was a retainer of the assassinated tenno, Odayaka-tenno (穏やか天皇) – personal name: Mitsuhide (光秀). Nobunaga avenged Tenno Mistuhide in the resulting civil war, later becoming tenno when the male heirs of the previous line renounced the imperial title in favor of Nobunaga. Thus, Nobunaga – posthumous name: Funiki-tenno (新時天皇) – became the new tenno of Yamatai while preserving the dynasty. Following tradition, Nobunaga dropped his clan surname, and the Idai dynasty branch of the Toyotomi clan continues to rule Yamatai to this day.
Foreign Relations
Yamatai maintains diplomatic relations with many nations to the west and east. The main embassies, referred to as a Taishikan (大使館/embassy) and run by a Taishi (大使/ambassador), are located in a nation's capital and represent the empire itself, while offices in other cities, referred to as Ryojikan (領事館/consulate) and run by a Ryoji (領事/consul), maintain relations between nationals living in those cities and the local populace.
Yamatai is also a longtime friend and ally of the Kingdom of Soleil, and is one half of the Copain-Tomo Alliance. This wasn't always so; one century after the end of the Age of Conquest, and four centuries after the founding of Soleil, Yamatai established a colony on the then-unoccupied end of the Vieillesse Peninsula, and expansion of that colony was viewed as a threat by the growing Kingdom of Soleil. After a ferocious war, which saw territorial control being pushed back and forth several times, Yamatai was expelled from the mainland, and period of hot & cold relations ensued for at least three generations.
Relations changed drastically when Soleil and Yamatai found a common enemy in an invading extra-dimensional horde, the source of which was never determined, and fought side-by-side to see the enemy defeated. The victory resulted in feeling of unity and friendship between the western and eastern peoples, and a permanent alliance was formed. This alliance, along with the friendship and camaraderie between the two countries, has endured ever since.
Armed Forces
Yamatai maintains a substantial army and navy, making it the dominant superpower of the Oriental sea (the waters between Fuso and Aquilonis) with no real rivals.
The Imperial Army & Navy is run by the Shogun, the highest military rank beneath the tenno. He is responsible for all affairs of the military.
Political Divisions
The empire is loosely divided into many provinces. As established by the first tenno of a united Yamatai during and after the Age of Conquest of the Two Hundred Years' War, the political structure of the empire is thus:
- The empire is divided into numerous sectors in four main levels:
- The first level are the Ryoiki (領域/Region), and can be spread across multiple islands. A ryoiki is governed by Sotoku (総督/Viceroy), which is appointed by the tenno from the family of a daimyo or samurai from one of Yamatai's many clans, major or minor. They are appointed by either inheritance or merit, depending on many factors and circumstances that the tenno needs to take into account. Most of the time they are appointed from the family of the prior sotoku, whether from the main family or a cadet-branch, but this is not always so. The governance of these lands are restricted to the ryoiki they are assigned to; the sotoku of the ryoiki of Morokoshi and Akantai are appointed from different clans in a similar way.
- The second level are the Gun (郡/Province). Any number of Gun can make up a whole ryoiki. Each individual gun is governed by a Shugo (守護/protector), the position of which is appointed by the sotoku, with the approval of the tenno, by merit or inheritance. Most of the time they are appointed from the family of the sotoku of the ryoiki or from the family of the prior shugo, whether from the main family or a cadet-branch. Sometimes they come from a clan that controls a different ryoiki, or they can be unrelated entirely.
- The third level are the Shigai (市街/city), the major cities within the gun. They are governed as a whole by Shicho (市長/mayor).
- The final level are the Ku (区), the minor settlements of all types within the gun outside of cities. These are mostly private lands and towns controlled either by a local samurai or a Yanushi (landlord), which are appointed by merit or inheritance.
- The sole exception to the political structure of Yamatai proper is the capital gun and city, Daitoshi. Daitoshi and the lands under its influence is governed directly by the tenno and the imperial family.
- Morokoshi, Yamatai's Marlakcese territories, and Akantai are similarly divided according the structure of the main empire's political divisions, as they are proper extensions of the empire.
- The clans that are appointed sotoku of the Morokoshi and Akantai Ryoiki are a relatively recent development. While equal rank, they have a lesser standing than the clans in Yamatai proper in Fuso.
- The Kappa islands in Maritymir, are the exceptions to the primary political structure established in the wake of the wars; they are a Kuiki (区域/zone) ruled by a Bugyo (奉行/magistrate) appointed by the tenno.
- Morokoshi and Akantai were treated the same way before they were organized into the primary political divisions as proper extensions of the empire.
|Yamatai Proper/Fuso
Clans & Nobility
Each noble clan is headed by a daimyo (大名) pledging fealty to the tenno. While each daimyo and all samurai still pledge fealty to the tenno, each and the political divisions enjoy a great deal of autonomy from the tenno.
The clans of Yamatai are grouped into four types: Teikoku Shiryu, Oritsu, Kishin, and Samatsu.
There are many clans across Yamatai with varying degrees of influence and noble ranks. Some of Yamatai's many clans, minor or major, don't actually rule any land, for one reason or another, but still retain some form of political influence; either through business dealings like trade or diplomacy, history as a political player in government, or from a history as a military family.
Rulership of the various political divisions are usually hereditary, depending on which clan controls it and how the ruling clan and/or the government chooses to handle the succession, unless a family is removed from power over a territory and replaced with another for one reason or another. And a single clan can actually have several members of their family appointed shugo, giving them control over multiple gun, even across the borders of a ryoiki.
The cities and towns governed by the shicho are not hereditary, even if the shicho is a the head of a minor cadet-clan that is a vassal of the daimyo. A shicho is a random noble, military officer, a landless samurai, or some other landless lord or citizen that is appointed directly by the government to rule the municipality, chosen solely by merit, and hereditary succession is not recognized in any instance unless the successor is chosen by merit alone.
The gun that make up a ryoiki are set up by law but actual ownership of each individual gun is always under dispute. It is not uncommon for a gun to change hands every so often for a couple of reasons: Since many clans, minor and major, are interrelated somewhere down the line, and most noble clans have one or several cadet-clans, conflict for inheritance and succession is a common occurrence throughout Yamatai. The main cause for this are succession rights crises caused by an inheritance dispute; if a minor clan that was ruling the gun as shugo ends without a potential heir, the tenno can hand the land to another clan to fill the vacancy, even if only temporarily, and this can lead to a minor clan being risen up to noble one.
War is another cause for a gun to change hands. If the previous ruling clan is removed from power over any amount of land by force, the tenno can recognize the victorious daimyo's claim to the land and appoint someone of that clan as shugo of the gun, making it part of the daimyo's realm, and the tenno can even side with the aggressor daimyo militarily to see the war concluded hurriedly. Otherwise, the tenno can refuse to recognize the claim or result of the war, and can command the daimyo to end the war or vacate the conquered land. If the daimyo refuses, the tenno can marshal troops against the aggressor daimyo, and even strip the offending lord of all lands and titles before giving them to someone else.
Assuming the tenno intervenes in the conflict on the side of the defending daimyo, and the war ends in favor of the defending daimyo, the tenno will often demand the aggressor daimyo to renew an oath of fealty and will exercise greater authority over the aggressor's future actions for a determined period. The tenno may also hand some or all of the aggressor's land over to another clan; another option would be to appoint a new daimyo from the many candidates of the defeated clan, usually one who stayed out of the conflict or sided with the tenno.
If the war ends in the aggressor daimyo's favor, often the tenno will often be forced to recognize the aggressor daimyo's claim to the land, but a demand for greater autonomy could also be granted; however, the latter outcome is a rarity.
Both of these issues has led to the unofficial creation of "realms" when a clan owns a great amount of land, and it is a constant fear that it could lead to a clan becoming so powerful that it threatens to topple the imperial family, or the ignition of another Warring States Period.
Regardless of what happens or how many gun a clan controls, the titles of sotoku of ryoiki are legally appointed only by the tenno.
|Teikoku Shiryu clans
Imperial Cadet clans
|Clans who are direct cadet branches of the imperial family. These clans date back to the earliest days of he Keiken emperorship. Despite being cadet branches of the imperial family, these clans typically don't have much more power or influence than the Kishin clans.
As members of the imperial family don't use surnames as a matter of tradition unless their status is revoked, members of the imperial family who are excluded from the line of succession or have their status revoked sometimes take one of these surnames.
|The name of the dynasty and the unofficial clan name of the imperial family, as members of the imperial family don't use surnames as a matter of tradition unless their status is revoked.
|The imperial line was founded by the Keiken clan, yet no longer holds the imperial title.
|Oritsu clans
Royal clans
|Clans who are not cadet branches of the imperial family but have some relation to them through kinship or marriage, even if it was very brief. These clans are direct vassals of the imperial family and typically have the most power and prestige in the politics, economics and military of the empire.
The parent lines that remain independently unrelated to the imperial family by marriage or kinship maintain a great degree of prestige and influence through cadet branch relations to the imperial family, yet these relations give them no legal right to the throne.
Kojo and spouses of the imperial family are usually chosen from one of these clans, but it's typically far game between them and the Kishin clans.
|The sotoku of Saisho Ryoiki is only appointed from the Oda clan as a matter of legal and historical significance, one of the rare instances where one clan has permanant governance over a ryoiki.
The current imperial family is descended from a cadet branch of the Oda clan that was a cadet branch of the Keiken clan.
|The ruling clan of the Kingdom of Mizuho, the Tsukahara clan, is a cadet branch of the Shimazu clan.
|The Shirayuki clan is well known for its prowess in the field of medicine, turning out more doctors and physicians than any other clan known, which it shares with its shinobi cadet branch.
This line is also the parent line of the ninja clan of the same name.
The sotoku of Kyokuhoku Ryoiki is normally appointed from the Shirayuki clan.
|The sotoku of Kaju-en Ryoiki is normally appointed from the Tachibana clan.
|The sotoku of Tsuyoinu Ryoiki is normally appointed from the Takeda clan.
The Takeda clan trains the best horsemen and cavalry of the empire.
The samurai military order, Furinkazan, was founded by a member of the Takeda clan.
|The current imperial family is a cadet branch of the Toyotomi clan, which is also a cadet branch of the Oda clan cadet branch of the Keiken clan that once held the throne.
|Kishin clans
Noble clans
|Clans that have great political, economic or military influence in the empire, yet are not held to the same level of prestige and standards of the Oritsu clans.
|The sotoku of Kaijo Ryoiki is normally appointed from the Aizawa clan.
|A cadet branch and vassal of the Oda clan. Nearly went extinct following a rebellion and civil war, but redemed itself with the ousting of its treacherous daimyo.
Once counted among the Oritsu clans, but was since demoted following said rebellion and civil war.
|The Akimoto clan is a Miao-originating cadet branch the Qiuyuan clan of Tianchao that sided with Yamatai against Tianchao during the invasions, and were rewarded with lands for their service.
The founding daimyo, Akimoto no Kuma (秋元の熊), was an alleged descendant of Xiangrikui Gongchen, the first lunaculus of Marlakcor. The sotoku of Kumatora Ryoiki in Morokoshi is only appointed from the Akimoto clan as a matter of legal and historical significance, one of the rare instances where one clan has permanant governance over a ryoiki.
Because the clan was founded and rules in Morokoshi, members of the Akimoto clan are rarely seen in Fuso.
|A cadet branch of the Fujiwara and Imagawa clans, founded from a political union between the clans during the Warring States period of the Two Hundred Years' War.
|The sotoku of Hae Ryoiki is normally appointed from the Higurashi clan.
The Higurashi clan is well known for its faith in Mioshie, turning out more priests and priestesses than any other clan known.
|The Nakajima clan of Yamatai is the parent clan of House Nakajima of Soleil, a Gallic-Genjin cadet branch that is a noble house of Soleil.
|The sotoku of Yakage Ryoiki is normally appointed from the Nomuchi clan.
The Nomuchi clan of Yakage Ryoiki is a vampiric clan, the only one one to rule a ryoiki.
|A cadet branch of the Fujiwara and Shimazu clans.
|Samatsu clans
Minor clans
|Clans that have some respectable recognition in terms of political and economic influence and military prowess, but aren't as influential as the Kishin clans.
|A cadet branch of the Aizawa clan that became mostly merfolk a few generations after a union between a man from the Aizawa clan and a mermaid.
|The Mizujin clan is an immigrant clan from Ningyo Kazan, and acts as an unofficial intermediary between Yamatai and Ningyo Kazan.
|The sotoku of Donchaku Ryoiki in Akantai is normally appointed from the Shodai clan.
|The sotoku of Fuyukori Ryoiki in Akantai is normally appointed from the Toketsu clan.
|Ninja clans
|Clans that run the Akatsuki Ninja Order or train ninjas outside the order's influence.
They typically don't have any influence in the economics or politics of Yamatai, in fact they try to stay out of it, yet maintain a voice in the government and some influence in the military.
|The parent line of the renegade cadet branch of the Inazuma clan that runs the Kaminari Ninja Order in the Empire of Raimei.
|A cadet branch of the main line same name related to the imperial family, with whom it shares the unique healing techniques of the whole Shirayuki clan.
Politics & Government
The empire is a hereditary monarchy ruled by the Tenno (天皇/Emperor), and the heir apparent is titled the Kotaishi (皇太子/Crown Prince). The spouse of the tenno is the Kogo (皇后/Empress). Direct relatives of the tenno, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, are titled Shinno (親王/Imperial Prince) and Naishinno (内親王/Imperial Princess) respectively. All other male and female relatives of the tenno (those too far down the line of succession to have any hope of succeeding the throne) are titled Koshi (皇子/Prince) and Kojo (皇女/Princess) respectively. Tenno who have abdicated and retied are titled Daijo-Tenno (太上天皇/Emperor Emeritus).
Deceased tenno are given a posthumous name after death, and are usually given one that relates to their personality or the nature of their reign somehow. Past tenno are typically referred to by their posthumous names but sometimes by their personal names, especially by those who knew them during their reigns, but tenno from before Shintoki-tenno's reign are known by their posthumous names only, their personal names forgotten to history.
Titular kings and queens within the empire, the first level of the non-royal nobility, are titled Osho (王将/Kings) and Ohi (王妃/Queens), while their closest relatives are titled Oji (王子/Prince) and Ojo (王女/Princess) respectively. Male and female relatives, the same-level nobility, are titled Shoko (諸侯/Prince) and Hime (媛/Princess) respectively. Due to the political structure of the empire, these titles are mostly ceremonial, relics of the preimperial eras, and hold only a small amount political influence.
The tenno's direct cabinet is the Daijo-kan (太政官/Council of State), the highest organ of the Imperial government beneath the tenno and above the Gekai.
|Position Title
|Highest Tier
Chancellor of the Realm
|The head of the Daijo-kan directly beneath the tenno. First officer of the cabinet.
Minister of the Left
|Direct superior of the Sadaiben.
Minister of the Right
|Direct superior of the Udaiben.
Minister of the Center
|2nd Tier
Major Counselor
|A counselor of the first rank in the Imperial court. There are commonly three Dainagon.
Middle Counselor
|A counselor of the second rank in the Imperial court. There are commonly three Chunagon.
Minor Counselor
|A counselor of the third rank in the Imperial court. There are commonly three Shonagon.
|Other high-ranking bureaucrats
|An associate counselor in the Imperial court. This office functions as a manager of daijo-kan activities within the palace.
|These are specifically named men who act at the sole discretion of the tenno. Among the duties of the Geki include writing out the titles conferred by the tenno. In cases of dispute between high officers, the Geki draft a statement of the case for both sides. Also, they look after any newly introduced business.
|The Eight Ministries
|The lower half of the Daijo-kan is the Eight Ministries.
|Ministries of the Left
|Ministries of the Right
|Overseen by the Sadaiben (左大弁/Major Controller of the Left). This administrator is charged with supervising the following four ministries:
|Overseen by the Udaiben (右大弁/Major Controller of the Right). This administrator is charged with supervising the following four ministries:
Ministry of the Center
|This ministry encompasses those of the Imperial Household whose functions bring them closest to the tenno.
Ministry of War
|Responsible for managing wars initiated and waged by the empire and drafting war declarations at the behest of the tenno. Also works with the Treasury Ministry to manage war expenditure.
Ministry of Civil Services
|This ministry collects and maintains biographical archives of meritorious subjects.
Ministry of Justice
|Appoints a series of hanji (判事/judges) to oversee trials of the state alongside the tenno, or in the event the tenno recuses himself from the trial.
Ministry of Ceremonies
|Also known as the "Ministry of the Interior".
Ministry of the Treasurey
|Responsible for managing the finances of the empire, including military and domestic expenditure, as well as regulating tax income from the Ministry of Taxation.
Ministry of Taxation
|This ministry is concerned with taxation and the general populace, police activities, and with land survey records. Registries for all towns and villages are maintained, including census records as well as birth and death records.
Ministry of the Imperial Household
|Responsible for managing the imperial palace. Normally headed by a senior member of the Imperial Family.
Beneath the Daijo-kan is the bureaucracy known as the Gikai (議会), the Imperial Legislature of Yamatai. This organ administrates the laws of the empire on behalf of the tenno under the supervision of the tenno and an official called the Tairo (大老). The members of the Gikai are called Giin (議員) and write the laws of the land, which are in turn executed by the tenno if he approves them. In the Gikai, rather than representing the clans, it is the gun that are represented, one Giin from each – in the early days of the empire it was seven from each, but the number was reduced as the empire expanded.
Giin are elected to the Gikai by popular vote (one of the few democratic processes of Yamatai), but the Giin representing the gun are normally from the same clan ruling it or from cadet-clans. Regardless, no matter how many gun any clan controls, the Giin representing the gun are required to swear an oath of impartiality before taking office. This is so that no one clan has too much influence in the Gikai, and any instance of perceived favoritism, no matter how small, is met with immediate dismissal from one's post.
The Gikai and the tenno usually work in conjunction, but the tenno is more powerful as there are very few checks and balances. There only a few things that the tenno the the Gikai must jointly agree on to become law, the main one being the ratification of treaties. The Gikai passes laws by a simple majority vote, and the Tairo will often serve as the tiebreaker in the event of one, but the tenno can also veto any laws at his leisure if he doesn't approve, and the Gikai has no power to overturn it. That said, the only thing the tenno has no power to do is make laws at his leisure. He can put forth a motion and propose a law, but the Gikai is required to vote on them for them to become law.
Notes & Trivia
- Fuso and the Genjin people are based off Japan and the Japanese people.
- Because of how the Japanese language – which the Genjin language "Yogata" is based on – works, the title "Tenno" (天皇/Emperor), and other titles, are both singular and plural.
- The term "Yamatai," while the name of the empire, is also sometimes erroneously used to refer to the entire land as a whole.
- Fuso includes the main lands currently occupied by the empire; the Eda Archipelago, occupied by Mizuho; the southernmost lands the Ningyo Archipelago, occupied by the Kingdom of Ningyo Kazan; and Hinomoto.
- The easternmost land of Fuso is the Suisho Islands. They extend into the western waters of Marlakcor.
- There has been constant debate amongst Qirsyllvian cartographers throughout history on whether of not the southernmost lands, the Ningyo Archipelago and Hinomoto, the former which is occupied by Yamatai's suzerainty, the Kingdom of Ningyo Kazan, is part of Fuso, but most agree that they are.
- Since the western islands of Yamatai are more "solid" while the eastern islands are more "fragment-like," some historians speculate that Fuso was once a whole continent before it broke up into smaller pieces, similar to what happened with Atlantis during the the Great Ketellaao. But whatever happened with Yamatai (if it even happened at all) happened thousands of years before that Atlantian catastrophe, likely before recorded history.


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Food & Drink
Were the Wright brothers really first? Photo sparks flight fight
By Thom Patterson, CNN • Updated 7th June 2013
Some things you just know for a fact. First U.S. president: George Washington. First human to walk on the moon: Neil Armstrong. First to achieve powered flight: Orville and Wilbur Wright.
Wrong. At least that's what Connecticut says.
State lawmakers passed a bill this week to honor Gustave Whitehead, who they claim beat the Wrights by two years.
Gustave who? Whitehead.
According to a 1901 Connecticut newspaper account,
-- a German immigrant -- flew his aircraft 150 feet in the air for about a half mile over the city of Bridgeport. The claim has been backed up by a respected aviation reference guide.
The debate has got the Smithsonian's longtime aviation historian frustrated and worried. It also has triggered conspiratorial accusations about a "secret agreement" between the revered museum and the Wright brothers.
Let's pause to remember that, hey, these guys are worldwide heroes. The image of their two-winged plane has appeared on U.S. money. On postage stamps, too. Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, where the Wrights flew, stands as a popular national landmark. It generates untold tourism dollars for a state that has labeled its car license tags with the words, "First in Flight."
A magnified image may show Whitehead's "monoplane in flight with a central mast" and a tree on the right, says John Brown. Brown says it could be a photo that reporters described in news reports of the day.
Courtesy John Brown
These are more than just bragging rights. A lot is at stake. This is a big deal.
"There is no legitimacy to the claim,"
says Tom Crouch, the Smithsonian's aviation historian.
"Justice is at risk. Credit should go where credit is deserved."
Not long after Whitehead's alleged flight, Crouch says, experts tried to find witnesses quoted in the Connecticut newspaper's account. Only one of two named witnesses could be found, says Crouch, and that witness said the flight never happened.
If Whitehead really was first to fly, Crouch asks, "why didn't he repeat it later? Did he forget the secret of flight? Then he started building machines based on other people's designs. Why would he do that if his own inventions were successful?"
Ever since Whitehead's flight, Crouch says "absolutely everyone has rejected those claims. No one accepted them." Until now.
"Jane's All the World's Aircraft," a respected aviation reference guide, has endorsed the claim.
Also, Australian aviation historian John Brown says he found key photographic evidence. Last March, while rummaging through a museum attic in Germany, Brown says he found a lost photo that may depict the plane in flight.
"It was quite an emotional moment for me. I just jumped up in the air screaming," Brown says when experts confirmed that the photo was authentic.
But does the photo show the plane in flight?
"It's just a blotch," says Crouch, describing the blurry image. "It's not an airplane."
Brown agrees that the blurry image fails to offer definitive proof. But rather than trying to prove what the photograph shows or doesn't show, Brown has been focusing on establishing the credibility of journalists and witness reports from the 1901 flight. Journalists in the 1930s and afterward interviewed 17 witnesses who said they saw Whitehead flying, Brown says. The stories by 14 of those witnesses were notarized. Based on his research, Brown believes Whitehead did indeed fly before the Wrights.
Are you a window seater or aisle flier?
Then there's that so-called "secret agreement."
"In fact," Crouch says, "it was never secret."
"That's not true," Brown said later. "It wasn't subject to the official secrets act, but it was kept from the public."
To hear Crouch tell it, when the Wright family signed a contract to give the Smithsonian the brothers' plane, the museum promised never to declare another aircraft the first to achieve powered flight.
Crouch says the family "stuck one clause into that contract that said if the Smithsonian ever says anybody flew before the Wright brothers, we have the right to take the airplane back. That clause is in fact still in the contract," Crouch says. "As an honest historian, I never felt bound by that clause. If I found evidence that I think indicated somebody else had flown before the Wrights, I would say so."
In this undated photo, Gustave Whitehead stands with his aircraft.
Gustave Whitehead research Committee
"What else would you say in his shoes?" asks Brown. "And if that's the case, why doesn't he examine the Whitehead claim?"
Brown says he recently worked with the Smithsonian on a project for the Smithsonian Channel.
Aviation geeks take on terrorism
Plane spotter destinations offer aviation thrills
For Connecticut state Rep. Charles Clemons Jr., one of the sponsors of the bill, acknowledging Whitehead's flight means money and prestige for his hometown.
"It will put Bridgeport on the map." Clemons says, "it will become synonymous with being first in flight, which would enable us to have a museum. With that, we would generate some tourist attractions." With the economy being what it is these days, Clemons says the tourism dollars would be important to the region.
Clemons mentions that Bridgeport is already known as the home of another flying object -- the Frisbee.
But that claim also has been the subject of some debate.
Does Clemons actually believe Whitehead was first? "Yeah," he says confidently. He thinks history books should be re-written to say Whitehead beat the Wrights.
No matter, says Crouch. The truth will win out. "You can't legislate history," he says.
Brown says, "it's the Smithsonian that tried to negotiate history with this contract with the Wrights."
It's back, but will Dreamliner live up to its name?
Meanwhile, the move puts Connecticut at odds with North Carolina and Ohio -- who've been fighting amongst themselves for decades for a share of the Wright brothers' tourism dollars.
Most everybody knows about the brothers' aviation experiments on the North Carolina dunes. But Ohio reminds the world that the Wrights lived in Dayton. There, in their bicycle shop, they invented and developed much of their aviation machinery. There's a reason why the University of Dayton's teams are called The Flyers.
But what about Jane's? Their reference guide endorsement has to mean something, right? As respected as Jane's is, says Crouch, "it's not a historical publication. It's a reference book. It's damaging and that's why it kind of worries me."
The Whitehead story, which pops up in the media every few decades, is dangerous, Crouch says, because it plants the seeds of doubt in a story which should be seen as indisputable.
However, this isn't the only dispute against the Wright brothers' legacy. Crouch says millions of Brazilians believe their pioneer aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont actually invented the airplane. "Brazil claims Santos-Dumont was first because his aircraft had wheels, and the Wright's launched on rails," Crouch says.
Whatever the case, Connecticut has started a brawl that could end up rewriting world history. Or it could all fade away in a blur of unproven claims.
What do you think? Are Connecticut lawmakers acting prematurely by officially declaring Whitehead as the first to achieve powered flight? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.
A year of the world's
Best Beaches
There's a perfect beach for every week of the year. Join us on a 12-month journey to see them all
Go to the best beaches

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|The Lie Factory
Only weeks after 9/11, the Bush administration set up a secret Pentagon unit to create the case for invading Iraq. Here is the inside story for how they pushed disinformation and bogus intelligence and led the nation to war.
IT'S A CRISP FALL DAY IN WESTERN VIRGINIA, a hundred miles from Washington, D.C., and a breeze is rustling the red and gold leaves of the Shenandoah hills. On the weather-beaten wood porch of a ramshackle 90-year-old farmhouse, at the end of a winding dirt-and-gravel road, Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski is perched on a plastic chair, wearing shorts, a purple sweatshirt, and muddy sneakers. Two scrawny dogs and a lone cat are on the prowl, and tne air is filled with swarms
So far, she says, no investigators have come knocking. Not from the Central Intelligence Agency, which conducted an internal inquiry into intelligence on Iraq, not from the congressional intelligence committees, not from the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. All of those bodies are ostensibly looking into the Bush administration's prewar Iraq intelligence, amid charges that the White House and the Pentagon exaggerated, distorted, or just plain lied about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda terrorists and its possession of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. In her hands, Kwiatkowski holds several pieces of the puzzle. Yet she, along with a score of other career officers recently retired or shuffled off to other jobs, has not been approached by anyone.
Kwiatkowski, 43, a now-retired Air Force officer who served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia (NESA) unit in the year before the invasion of Iraq, observed how the Pentagon's Iraq war-planning unit manufactured scare stories about Iraq's weapons and ties to terrorists. "It wasn't intelligence-it was propaganda," she says. "They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together." It was by turning such bogus intelligence into talking points for U.S. officials-including ominous lines in speeches by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell's testimony at the U.N. Security Council last February-that the administration pushed American public opinion into supporting an unnecessary war.
Until now, the story of how the Bush administration produced its wildly exaggerated estimates of the threat posed by Iraq has never been revealed in full. But, for the first time, a detailed investigation by Mother Jones, based on dozens of interviews-some on the record, some with officials who insisted on anonymity-exposes the workings of a secret Pentagon intelligence unit and of the Defense Department's war-planning task force, the Office of Special Plans. It's the story of a close-knit team of ideologues who spent a decade or more hammering out plans for an attack on Iraq and who used the events of September 11, 2001, to set it into motion.
SIX MONTHS AFTER THE END of major combat in Iraq, the United States had spent $300 million trying to find banned weapons in Iraq, and President Bush was seeking $600 million more to extend the search. Not found were Iraq's Scuds and other long-range missiles, thousands of barrels and tons of anthrax and botulism stock, sarin and VX nerve agents, mustard gas, biological and chemical munitions, mobile labs for producing biological weapons, and any and all evidence of a reconstituted nuclear-arms program, all of which had been repeatedly cited as justification for the war. Also missing was evidence of Iraqi collaboration with Al Qaeda.
The reports, virtually all false, of Iraqi weapons and terrorism ties emanated from an apparatus that began to gestate almost as soon as the Bush administration took power. In the very first meeting of the Bush national-security team, one day after President Bush took the oath of office in January 2001, the issue of invading Iraq was raised, according to one of the participants in the meeting-and officials all the way down the line started to get the message, long before 9/11. Indeed, the Bush team at the Pentagon hadn't even been formally installed before Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of Defense, and Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of Defense for policy, began putting together what would become the vanguard for regime change in Iraq.
Both Wolfowitz and Feith have deep roots in the neoconservative movement. One of the most influential Washington neoconservatives in the foreign-policy establishment during the Republicans' wilderness years of the 1990s, Wolfowitz has long held that not taking Baghdad in 1991 was a grievous mistake. He and others now prominent in the administration said so repeatedly over the past decade in a slew of letters and policy papers from neoconservative groups like the Project for the New American Century and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. Feith, a former aide to Richard Perle at the Pentagon in the 1980s and an activist in far-right Zionist circles, held the view that there was no difference between U.S. and Israeli security policy and that the best way to secure both countries' future was to solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem not by serving as a broker, but with the United States as a force for "regime change" in the region.
Called in to help organize the Iraq war-planning team was a longtime Pentagon official, Harold Rhode, a specialist on Islam who speaks Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, and Farsi. Though Feith would not be officially confirmed until July 2001, career military and civilian officials in NESA began to watch his office with concern after Rhode set up shop in Feith's office in early January. Rhode, seen by many veteran staffers as an ideological gadfly, was officially assigned to the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, an in-house Pentagon think tank headed by fellow neocon Andrew Marshall. Rhode helped Feith lay down the law about the department's new anti-Iraq, and broadly anti-Arab, orientation. In one telling incident, Rhode accosted and harangued a visiting senior Arab diplomat, telling him that there would be no "bartering in the bazaar anymore.... You're going to have to sit up and pay attention when we say so."
Rhode refused to be interviewed for this story, saying cryptically, "Those who speak, pay."
According to insiders, Rhode worked with Feith to purge career Defense officials who weren't sufficiently enthusiastic about the muscular anti-Iraq crusade that Wolfowitz and Feith wanted. Rhode appeared to be "pulling people out of nooks and crannies of the Defense Intelligence Agency and other places to replace us with," says a former analyst. "They wanted nothing to do with the professional staff. And they wanted us the fuck out of there."
The unofficial, off-site recruitment office for Feith and Rhode was the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank whose 12th-floor conference room in Washington is named for the dean of neoconservative defense strategists, the late Albert Wohlstetter, an influential RAND analyst and University of Chicago mathematician. Headquartered at AEI is Richard Perle, Wohlstetter's prize protege, the godfather of the AEI-Defense Department nexus of neoconservatives who was chairman of the Pentagon's influential Defense Policy Board. Rhode, along with Michael Rubin, a former AEI staffer who is also now at the Pentagon, was a ubiquitous presence at AEI conferences on Iraq over the past two years, and the two Pentagon officials seemed almost to be serving as stage managers for the AEI events, often sitting in the front row and speaking in stage whispers to panelists and AEI officials. Just after September 11, 2001, Feith and Rhode recruited David Wurmser, the director of Middle East studies for AEI, to serve as a Pentagon consultant.
Wurmser would be the founding participant of the unnamed, secret intelligence unit at the Pentagon, set up in Feith's office, which would be the nucleus of the Defense Department's Iraq disinformation campaign that was established within weeks of the attacks in New York and Washington. While the CIA and other intelligence agencies concentrated on Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda as the culprit in the 9/11 attacks, Wolfowitz and Feith obsessively focused on Iraq. It was a theory that was discredited, even ridiculed, among intelligence professionals. Daniel Benjamin, co-author of The Age of Sacred Terror, was director of counterterrorism at the National Security Council in the late 1990s. "In 1998, we went through every piece of intelligence we could find to see if there was a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq," he says. "We came to the conclusion that our intelligence agencies had it right: There was no noteworthy relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraq. I know that for a fact." Indeed, that was the consensus among virtually all anti-terrorism specialists.
In short, Wurmser, backed by Feith and Rhode, set out to prove what didn't exist.
IN AN ADMINISTRATION devoted to the notion of "Feith-based intelligence," Wurmser was ideal. For years, he'd been a shrill ideologue, part of the minority crusade during the 1990s that was beating the drums for war against Iraq. Along with Perle and Feith, in 1996 Wurmser and his wife, Meyrav, wrote a provocative strategy paper for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu called "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm." It called on Israel to work with Jordan and Turkey to "contain, destabilize and roll back" various states in the region, overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq, press Jordan to restore a scion of the Hashemite dynasty to the Iraqi throne, and, above all, launch military assaults against Lebanon and Syria as a "prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East which would threaten Syria's territorial integrity."
In 1997, Wurmser wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal called "Iraq Needs a Revolution" and the next year co-signed a letter with Perle calling for all-out U.S. support of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an exile group led by Ahmad Chalabi, in promoting an insurgency in Iraq. At AEI, Wurmser wrote Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein, essentially a book-length version of "A Clean Break" that proposed an alliance between Jordan and the INC to redraw the map of the Middle East. Among the mentors cited by Wurmser in the book: Chalabi, Perle, and Feith.
The purpose of the unnamed intelligence unit, often described as a Pentagon "cell," was to scour reports from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and other agencies to find nuggets of information linking Iraq, Al Qaeda, terrorism, and the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In a controversial press briefing in October 2002, a year after Wurmser's unit was established, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged that a primary purpose of the unit was to cull factoids, which were then used to disparage, undermine, and contradict the CIA's reporting, which was far more cautious and nuanced than Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith wanted. Rumsfeld particularly enjoyed harassing the CIA staffer who briefed him every morning, using the type of data produced by the intelligence unit. "What I could do is say, 'Gee, what about this?'" Rumsfeld noted. "'Or what about that? Has somebody thought of this?'" Last June, when Feith was questioned on the same topic at a briefing, he acknowledged that the secret unit in fact looked at the connection between Iraq and terrorism, saying, "You can't rely on deterrence to deal with the problem of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of state sponsors of terrorism because [of] the possibility that those state sponsors might employ chemical weapons or biological weapons by means of a terrorist organization proxy...."
Though Feith, in that briefing, described Wurmser's unit as an innocent project, "a global exercise" that was not meant to put pressure on other intelligence agencies or create skewed intelligence to fit preconceived policy notions, many other sources assert that it did exactly that. That the White House and the Pentagon put enormous pressure on the CIA to go along with its version of events has been widely reported, highlighted by visits to CIA headquarters by Vice President Cheney and Lewis Libby, his chief of staff. Led by Perle, the neocons seethed with contempt for the CIA. The CIA'S analysis, said Perle, "isn't worth the paper it's printed on." Standing in a crowded hallway during an AEI event, Perle added, "The CIA is status quo oriented. They don't want to take risks."
That became the mantra of the shadow agency within an agency.
Putting Wurmser in charge of the unit meant that it was being run by a pro-Iraq-war ideologue who'd spent years calling for a pre-emptive invasion of Baghdad and who was clearly predisposed to find what he wanted to see. Adding another layer of dubious quality to the endeavor was the man partnered with Wurmser, F. Michael Maloof. Maloof, a former aide to Perle in the 1980s Pentagon, was twice stripped of his high-level security clearances-once in late 2001 and again last spring, for various infractions. Maloof was also reportedly involved in a bizarre scheme to broker contacts between Iraqi officials and the Pentagon, channeled through Perle, in what one report called a "rogue [intelligence] operation" outside officiai CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency channels.
As the momentum for war began to build in early 2002, Wolfowitz and Feith beefed up the intelligence unit and created an Iraq war-planning unit in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia Affairs section, run by Deputy Undersecretary of Defense William Luti, under the rubric "Office of Special Plans," or OSP; the new unit's director was Abram N. Shulsky. By then, Wurmser had moved on to a post as senior adviser to Undersecretary of State John Bolton, yet another neocon, who was in charge of the State Department's disarmament, proliferation, and WMD office and was promoting the Iraq war strategy there. Shulsky's OSP, which incorporated the secret intelligence unit, took control, banishing veteran experts-including Joseph McMillan, James Russell, Larry Hanauer, and Marybeth McDevitt-who, despite years of service to NESA, either were shuffled off to other positions or retired. For the next year, Luti and Shulsky not only would oversee war plans but would act aggressively to shape the intelligence product received by the White House.
Both Luti and Shulsky were neoconservatives who were ideological soulmates of Wolfowitz and Feith. But Luti was more than that. He'd come to the Pentagon directly from the office of Vice President Cheney. That gave Luti, a recently retired, decorated Navy captain whose career ran from combat aviation to command of a helicopter assault ship, extra clout. Along with his colleague Colonel William Bruner, Luti had done a stint as an aide to Newt Gingrich in 1996 and, like Perle and Wolfowitz, was an acolyte of Wohlstetter's. "He makes Ollie North look like a moderate," says a NESA veteran.
Shulsky had been on the Washington scene since the mid-1970s. As a Senate intelligence committee staffer for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, he began to work with early neoconservatives like Perle, who was then an aide to Senator Henry Jackson. Later, in the Reagan years, Shulsky followed Perle to the Pentagon as Perle's arms-control adviser. In the '90s, Shulsky co-authored a book on intelligence called Silent Warfare, with Gary Schmitt. Shulsky had served with Schmitt on Moynihan's staff and they had remained friends. Asked about the Pentagon's Iraq intelligence "cell," Schmitt-who is currently the executive director of the Project for the New American Century-says that he can't say much about it "because one of my best friends is running it."
According to Lt. Colonel Kwiatkowski, Luti and Shulsky ran NESA and the Office of Special Plans with brutal efficiency, purging people they disagreed with and enforcing the party line. "It was organized like a machine," she says. "The people working on the neocon agenda had a narrow, well-defined political agenda. They had a sense of mission." At NESA, Shulsky, she says, began "hot-desking," or taking an office wherever he could find one, working with Feith and Luti, before formally taking the reins of the newly created OSP. Together, she says, Luti and Shulsky turned cherry-picked pieces of uncorroborated, anti-Iraq intelligence into talking points, on issues like Iraq's WMD and its links to Al Qaeda. Shulsky constantly updated these papers, drawing on the intelligence unit, and circulated them to Pentagon officials, including Rumsfeld, and to Vice President Cheney. "Of course, we never thought they'd go directly to the White House," she adds.
Kwiatkowski recalls one meeting in which Luti, pressed to finish a report, told the staff, "I've got to get this over to 'Scooter' right away." She later found out that "Scooter" was none other than Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff. According to Kwiatkowski, Cheney had direct ties through Luti into NESA/OSP, a connection that was highly unorthodox.
"Never, ever, ever would a deputy undersecretary of Defense work directly on a project for the vice president," she says. "It was a little clue that we had an informal network into Vice President Cheney's office."
Although Feith insists that the OSP did not seek to gather its own intelligence, Kwiatkowski and others sharply disagree. Staff working for Luti and Shulsky in NESA/OSP churned out propaganda-style intelligence, she says. As an example, she cited the work of a U.S. intelligence officer and Arabic specialist, Navy Lt. Commander Youssef Aboul-Enein, who was a special assistant to Luti. "His job was to peruse the Arabic-language media to find articles that would incriminate Saddam Hussein about terrorism, and he translated these." Such raw intelligence is usually subject to a thorough vetting process, tracked, verified, and checked by intelligence professionals. But not at OSP-the material that it produced found its way directly into speeches by Bush, Cheney, and other officials.
According to Melvin Goodman, a former CIA official and an intelligence specialist at the National War College, the OSP officials routinely pushed lower-ranking staff around on intelligence matters. "People were being pulled aside [and being told], 'We saw your last piece and it's not what we're looking for,'" he says. "It was pretty blatant." Two State Department intelligence officials, Greg Thielmann and Christian Westermann, have both charged that pressure was being put on them to shape intelligence to fit policy, in particular from Bolton's office. "The Al Qaeda connection and nuclear weapons issue were the only two ways that you could link Iraq to an imminent security threat to the U.S.," Thielmann told the New York Times. "And the administration was grossly distorting the intelligence on both things."
BESIDES CHENEY, key members of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, including Perle and ex-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, all Iraq hawks, had direct input into NESA/OSP. The offices of NESA were located on the Pentagon's fourth floor, seventh corridor of D Ring, and the Policy Board's offices were directly below, on the third floor. During the run-up to the Iraq war, Gingrich often came up for closed-door meetings with Luti, who in 1996 had served as a congressional fellow in Speaker of the House Gingrich's office.
As OSP got rolling, Luti brought in Colonel Bruner, a former military aide to Gingrich, and, together, Luti and Bruner opened the door to a vast flow of bogus intelligence fed to the Pentagon by Iraqi defectors associated with Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress group of exiles. Chalabi founded the Iraqi National Congress in 1992, with the help of a shadowy CIA-connected public-relations firm called the Rendon Group, one of whose former employees, Francis Brooke, has been a top aide to Chalabi ever since. A scion of an aristocratic Iraqi family, Chalabi fled Baghdad at the age of 13, in 1958, when the corrupt Iraqi Hashemite monarchy was overthrown by a coalition of communists and the Iraqi military. In the late 1960s, Chalabi studied mathematics at the University of Chicago with Wohlstetter, who introduced him to Richard Perle more than a decade later. Long associated with the heart of the neoconservative movement, Chalabi founded Petra Bank in Jordan, which grew to be Jordan's third-largest bank by the 1980s. But Chalabi was accused of bank fraud, embezzlement, and currency manipulation, and he barely escaped before Jordanian authorities could arrest him; in 1992, he was convicted and sentenced in absentia to more than 20 years of hard labor. After founding the INC, Chalabi's bungling, unreliability, and penchant for mismanaging funds caused the CIA to sour on him, but he never lost the support of Perle, Feith, Gingrich, and their allies; once, soon after 9/11, Perle invited Chalabi to address the Defense Policy Board.
According to multiple sources, Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress sent a steady stream of misleading and often faked intelligence reports into U.S. intelligence channels. That information would flow sometimes into NESA/OSP directly, sometimes through Defense Intelligence Agency debriefings of Iraqi defectors via the Defense Human Intelligence Service, and sometimes through the INC's own U.S.-funded Intelligence Collection Program, which was overseen by the Pentagon. The INC's intelligence "isn't reliable at all," according to Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA chief of counterterrorism.
"Much of it is propaganda. Much of it is telling the Defense Department what they want to hear, using alleged informants and defectors who say what Chalabi wants them to say, [creating] cooked information that goes right into presidential and vice presidential speeches."
Bruner, the aide to Luti and Gingrich's former staffer, "was Chalabi's handler," says Kwiatkowski. "He would arrange meetings with Chalabi and Chalabi's folks," she says, adding that the INC leader often brought people into the NESA/OSP offices for debriefings. Chalabi claims to have introduced only three actual defectors to the Pentagon, a figure Thielmann considers "awfully low." However, according to an investigation by the Los Angeles Times, the three defectors provided by Chalabi turned up exactly zero useful intelligence. The first, an Iraqi engineer, claimed to have specific information about biological weapons, but his information didn't pan out; the second claimed to know about mobile labs, but that information, too, was worthless; and the third, who claimed to have data about Iraq's nuclear program, proved to be a fraud. Chalabi also claimed to have given the Pentagon information about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda. "We gave the names of people who were doing the links," he told an interviewer from PBS'S Frontline. Those links, of course, have not been discovered. Thielmann told the same Frontline interviewer that the Office of Special Plans didn't apply strict intelligence-verification standards to "some of the information coming out of Chalabi and the INC that OSP and the Pentagon ran with."
In the war's aftermath, the Defense Intelligence Agency-which is not beholden to the neoconservative civilians at the Pentagon-leaked a report it prepared, concluding that few, if any, of the INC's informants provided worthwhile intelligence.
SO FAR, DESPITE ALL of the investigations underway, there is little sign that any of them are going to delve into the operations of the Luti-Shulsky Office of Special Plans and its secret intelligence unit. Because it operates in the Pentagon's policy shop, it is not officially part of the intelligence community, and so it is seemingly immune to congressional oversight.
With each passing day, it is becoming excruciatingly clearer just how wrong U.S. intelligence was in regard to Iraqi weapons and support for terrorism. The American teams of inspectors in the Iraq Survey Group, which has employed up to 1,400 people to scour the country and analyze the findings, have not been able to find a shred of evidence of anything other than dusty old plans and records of weapons apparently destroyed more than a decade ago. Countless examples of fruitless searches have been reported in the media. To cite one example: U.S. soldiers followed an intelligence report claiming that a complex built for Uday Hussein, Saddam's son, hid a weapons warehouse with poison-gas storage tanks. "Well," U.S. Army Major Ronald Hann Jr. told the Los Angeles Times, "the warehouse was a carport. It still had two cars inside. And the tanks had propane for the kitchen."
Countless other errors and exaggerations have become evident. The thousands of aluminum tubes supposedly imported by Iraq for uranium enrichment were fairly conclusively found to be designed to build noncontroversial rockets. The long-range unmanned aerial vehicles, allegedly built to deliver bioweapons, were small, rickety, experimental planes with wood frames. The mobile bioweapon labs turned out to have had other, civilian purposes. And the granddaddy of all falsehoods, the charge that Iraq sought uranium in the West African country of Niger, was based on forged documents-documents that the CIA, the State Department, and other agencies knew were fake nearly a year before President Bush highlighted the issue in his State of the Union address in January 2003.
"Either the system broke down," former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was sent by the CIA to visit Niger and whose findings helped show that the documents were forged, told Mother Jones, "or there was selective use of bits of information to justify a decision to go to war that had already been taken."
Edward Luttwak, a neoconservative scholar and author, says flatly that the Bush administration lied about the intelligence it had because it was afraid to go to the American people and say that the war was simply about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Instead, says Luttwak, the White House was groping for a rationale to satisfy the United Nations' criteria for war. "Cheney was forced into this fake posture of worrying about weapons of mass destruction," he says. "The ties to Al Qaeda? That's complete nonsense."
In the Senate, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) is pressing for the Intelligence Committee to extend its investigation to look into the specific role of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, but there is strong Republican resistance to the idea.
In the House, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) has introduced legislation calling for a commission to investigate the intelligence mess and has collected more than a hundred Democrats-but no Republicans-in support of it. "I think they need to be looked at pretty carefully," Waxman told Mother Jones when asked about the Office of Special Plans. "I'd like to know whether the political people pushed the intelligence people to slant their conclusions."
Congressman Waxman, meet Lt. Colonel Kwiatkowski.


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These are the guest stars and events that the networks have planned for the first week of November sweeps:
Monday, Oct. 29
90210 (The CW)
Olympic gold medalist Ryan Lochte tests out his acting skills when he makes a cameo appearance at a resort where Naomi and Max are staying.
The Voice (NBC)
Grab your fighting gloves! Knock-out rounds begin.
9/8c (CBS)
2 Broke Girls (CBS)
Cedric the Entertainer stops by as Earl's estranged son, Darius, who comes to New York with hopes of becoming a stand-up comedian.
Mike & Molly (CBS)
Gerald McRaney guest-stars as Mike's police captain who offers Mike a pair of basketball tickets for a hefty price — a date with Mike's mom!
Castle (ABC)
What happens when the prime suspect is... Rick Castle? Beckett will wrestle with just how well she knows her new lover — especially after it's revealed Castle may have been involved with the victim.
Hawaii Five-0 (CBS)
Halloween comes to the islands as the team investigates a ritualistic murder. Former Catwoman Lee Meriwether guest-stars.
Revolution (NBC)
Viewers will finally meet Aaron's wife Priscilla, played by Maureen Sebastian.
Tuesday, Oct. 30
When a petty officer is gunned down in a billionaire's car, the NCIS team discovers a link to Gibbs' namesake, World War II veteran Leroy Jethro Moore (The Empire Strikes Back's Billy Dee Williams).
Happy Endings (ABC)
Dave and Alex go apartment hunting but their inability to commit to anything — sound familiar? — makes things tricky for their real estate agent (New Girl's Rachael Harris).
NCIS: Los Angeles (CBS)
In the first hour of a two-parter, Sam reconnects with a CIA agent from his past who soon turns up dead. Is it suicide or murder? The investigation will lead to a major revelation about Sam.
Private Practice (ABC)
Sam's mom (Alfre Woodard) asks for his help after her boss (Shaft's Richard Roundtree) falls ill.
The New Normal (NBC)
George Takei guest-stars and Nicole Richie plays herself in this Halloween-themed episode, which also sees Bryan try to pay homage to reality sensation Honey Boo Boo — much to David's protest.
Wednesday, Oct. 31
It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (ABC)
Get in the Halloween spirit with a re-broadcast of this classic animated special.
Law & Order: SVU (NBC)
True Blood actress Lindsay Pulsipher guest stars as Rollins' younger, trouble-making sister.
Criminal Minds (CBS)
When the BAU team investigates the disappearance of four men in rural Oregon, they cross paths with a farmer Emma Kerrigan (House vet Anne Dudek).
Nashville (ABC)
Just as Teddy's political campaign heats up, a woman from his past (Kimberly Williams-Paisley) shows up with a secret. Good Morning America's Robin Roberts plays herself when Juliette appears on the morning show to burnish her image.
Thursday, Nov. 1
Country Music Awards (ABC)
Carrie Underwood and Brad Paisley host for the fifth time. Scheduled performances include Lady Antebellum, Blake Shelton, Jason Aldean, Dierks Bentley, Kelly Clarkson, Miranda Lambert and more.
The Big Bang Theory (CBS)
Sheldon's friendship with Stephen Hawking is put to the test over a game of "Words with Friends." The renowned scientist will lend his voice to the episode.
The Vampire Diaries (The CW)
It's flashback time! The show ventured back to the 12th century when Klaus tells Stefan about an encounter with a powerful group of vampire hunters. In present time, get ready for some rad Damon and Elena dancing when they go to a frat party.
The X Factor (Fox)
It's the first live show for Simon Cowell, LA Reid and new judges Demi Lovato and Britney Spears.
The Office (NBC)
Josh Groban returns as Andy's brother, when Andy tries to help his family out after learning his dad blew all their money.
Parks and Recreation (NBC)
Leslie is nervous about meeting Ben's divorced parents (Breaking Bad's Jonathan Banks and ER alum Glenne Headly) for the first time.
Elementary (CBS)
Sherlock learns more about Joan's decision to abandon her surgical career when her former friend and colleague, Dr. Carrie Dwyer (Anika Noni Rose), pops up.
Friday, Nov. 2
America's Next Top Model (The CW)
In Jamaica, the girls get to meet Bob Marley's daughter Cedella who has designed a fashionable new line of bikinis.
Undercover Boss (CBS)
The Season 4 premiere takes viewers undercover with Modell's Sporting Goods CEO Mitchel B. Modell.
Malibu Country (ABC)
It's the premiere of Reba McEntire's new series about a cheated-on wife of a country star who moves to California with her mom and kids and tries to restart her own singing career.
Sunday, Nov. 4
Once Upon a Time (ABC)
As part of her efforts to get her and Mary Margaret back to Storybooke, Emma travels up a treacherous beanstalk with Captain Hook to try to steal a magical compass from a violent giant (Lost's Jorge Garcia).
The Good Wife (CBS)
Amanda Peet guest-stars as Alicia's latest client, a female military officer who accuses a civilian contractor of trying to rape her in Afghanistan. Brian Dennehy also appears as the opposing counsel in an episode directed by series star Josh Charles.


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Episode 10×04 – Home Again
November 3rd, 2016
Michael David is here to help us discuss 10×04 – "Home Again" wherein graffiti OR a sculpture comes alive to thwart people that want to shelter the homeless. Also a prime opportunity for Kristen Cloke is given away to a weirdo that can never fill her shoes. And the Scully family continues to be the worst.
Email: email@example.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/introtox
Where we all hope Mulder doesn't try to un-cremete Ma Scully.
Listen to Episode 10×4 – 1:58:23
Tags: Alessandro Juliani, Arcadia, Band-Aid Nose Man, body torn apart, Charlie was right, Chris Shields, Dana Scully, Daniel Jacobsen, Daryl Landry, Daryl Shuttleworth, David Duchovny, Detective Gross, Dr. Louise Colquitt, Drunk Reyes, Forensic Technician, Fox Mulder, Fuck the Scully Family, Garbage Monster, Gary Sekhon, Gillian Anderson, Glen Morgan, graffiti, homelessness, Jack Budd, Jannen Karr, John DeSantis, Joseph Cutler, Margaret Scully, mother in a coma, Nancy Huff, Nurse Taillie, Peggy Jo Jacobs, Proudley, Sachin Sahel, Seth Whittaker. Fitzpatrick, Sheila Larken, Tim Armstrong, Trashman, Tulpa, Veena Sood, William


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Somewhere along the journey, the lines between work and play, rest and recreation changed.
For most of the years that my husband and I have been together, we shared energy and squinted-eyed enthusiasm for filling our pockets of free time with making memories, having fun, exploring, travelling and being spontaneous in a sensible sort of way. Our summers were long and full of weekends away and eating outdoors and with friends in the weekday evenings.
Each summer we would make our trip to our favourite spots in Cornwall. Pothcurno being one of them. Pothcurno houses an open air theatre on the edge of a cliff, overlooking seas with a blue swirl that could easily be confused for a Mediterranean destination. We hang around until the evening until we grab steaming hot cheese and baked bean jacket potatoes, a blanket and sit under the stars watching opera whilst sat on the cool stone.
Culture and history soaking in Bath, picnics in Windsor, outdoor pubs and chips in Brighton, scenic walks and clotted cream ice-cream in the cotswolds or nearer to home and ambling the streets of london popping our head into Dim Sum or kathi roll joints. I have a lot of happy memories.
In the cooler months we would visit farmers markets, recuperate in Spa's, go to Edinburgh for windy stops and chill out in cottages in wales, and most excitingly, take our annual holiday to more exotic destinations. Each of my January birthdays after graduating was spent away, somewhere sunny, making memories. One of my birthdays was spent on a house boat in Kerela, another abseiling over shallow waters in Mauritius, one looking down at the pitons whilst having dinner in st.Lucia. They made me a fresh coco and coconut cake made with locally sourced ingredients. I had one birthday on safari, eating guava cheesecake in South Africa, whilst watching wilderbeast and one on the most scenic train journey near Zurich. We were both working full on, heavy roles and this trip was the carrot in our otherwise hectic lives.
Along the way, a lot changed. We had our boy, who has showered immense joy and love into our lives. We are a salary down. Husband has 23 international trips abroad planned this year, for work. We are tired.
This week I was clearing through the guest room and stumbled upon some old photographs. I sat down, puffed out at the realisation of how things have changed. My little one came and sat on my lap, 'what you looking at mumma'. I told my nearly-two-year old that mumma was looking at lovely memories. One of the common threads between each of the pictures is that the long journeys were occupied with munching on Dhokla (steamed and spiced rice and lentil flour cakes, which are sour and fluffy clouds of scrummy glory) or muthia Dhokla, which a Gujarati savoury bite made from grated veg and cooked rice with some spice and also steamed and then tempered in curry leaves and mustard, cumin and chilli. It got me thinking. Things have got to change again. Having fun is the way to stay alive inside.
It also got me thinking about rice flour steamed dumplings, one of the Gujarati items my mum makes so well…put them all together and roll them around, I created these little steamed dumplings with the added sweetness of carrot and courgette. They make wonderful snacks to accompany a cuppa. Spicy, dense, filling, hot, smooth…oh, go on.
Ingredients to make 24 dumplings
3 cups of hot water
2 long green chillies
125g grated carrot
125g grated courgette
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 tsp ajwain, or carom seeds
1 3/4 cup of ground rice
Salt to taste
Oil to grease palms when forming the dumplings
1. In a large vessel, heat the water and add the cumin seeds and coriander seeds with the minced chilli.
2. When the water is boiling add the courgettes and carrots, stir and simmer for a minute. When the vegetables have softened, start to trickle in the ground rice whilst stirring the water with a wooden spoon, to avoid lumps forming.
3. Continue to stir more swiftly, until a grainy dough has been formed.
4. Turn off the heat and tip the dough into a very large plate.
5. Prepare your steamer and oil your palms. Take golf ball sized amounts of dough, form a ball and then flatten it in your palms. Try not to let the ball crack.
6. Steam the dumplings for 8-10 minutes and serve with chilli oil, whilst still hot and moist.
I am linking this to Marks Made with Love Mondays because it is all kme made
I'm also liking with Helen and Michelle, for hidden veg


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By Marcia Goodrich
HOUGHTON — Just as open-source design has driven down the cost of software to the point that it is accessible to anyone with an Internet connection, open-source designs and 3D printing are driving down the cost of making scientific equipment.
As part of that movement, a Michigan Technological University lab has introduced a library of open-source, 3D-printable optics components in a paper published in PLOS One from the Public Library of Science.
Joshua Pearce, an associate professor of materials science and engineering and electrical and computer engineering, explains: "This library operates as a free, flexible, low-cost tool set for developing both research and teaching optics hardware."
Pearce's lab used OpenSCAD, an open-source computer-aided design software tool, to make the designs customizable. They can be printed on open-source RepRap 3D printers, and the electronics and controls are based on the open-source Arduino microcontroller environment.
The study found cost reductions generally over 97 percent, with some components costing only 1 percent of the market price for optical products of similar function.
"For example, commercial optical rail sells for around $380 per meter, and you can build an open alternative with printed parts for less than what you would pay in sales tax," says Pearce. "And there is no sales tax, shipping costs or waiting for parts to come in stock or ship."
This method of designing and building scientific hardware will let a much broader audience participate in optical experimentation, both for research and teaching, he says. For example, to outfit an undergraduate teaching laboratory with 30 optics setups costs less than $500 using the open-source optics approach, compared to $15,000 for commercial versions.
"Saving money is nice, particularly for cash-strapped schools, but the real advantage of this approach is it enables researchers to fabricate custom optics equipment in house," Pearce said. "You get exactly what you need for your experiments, even if they are not commercially available. This is the future of scientific equipment; we have only just started."
The full text is published as C. Zhang, N. C. Anzalone, R. P. Faria and J. M. Pearce, "Open-Source 3D-Printable Optics Equipment" PLOS One (2013)
To download open optics designs from the paper and others, see Pearce's designs on Thingiverse.


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Ending all forms of discrimination against women and girls is not only a basic human right, but it also crucial to accelerating sustainable development. It has been proven time and again, that empowering women and girls has a multiplier effect, and helps drive up economic growth and development across the board.
Since 2000, UNDP, together with our UN partners and the rest of the global community, has made gender equality central to our work. We have seen remarkable progress since then. More girls are now in school compared to 15 years ago, and most regions have reached gender parity in primary education. Women now make up to 41 percent of paid workers outside of agriculture, compared to 35 percent in 1990.
The SDGs aim to build on these achievements to ensure that there is an end to discrimination against women and girls everywhere. There are still huge inequalities in the labour market in some regions, with women systematically denied equal access to jobs. Sexual violence and exploitation, the unequal division of unpaid care and domestic work, and discrimination in public office, all remain huge barriers.
Affording women equal rights to economic resources such as land and property are vital targets to realizing this goal. So is ensuring universal access to sexual and reproductive health. Today there are more women in public office than ever before, but encouraging women leaders will help strengthen policies and legislation for greater gender equality.
Goals in action
FGM ban begins a pivotal era for women and girls in The Gambia
In November 2015, the practice of female genital mutilation or cutting (FGM/C) was banned and subsequently criminalized in The Gambia. This marks an important milestone in the country's journey to end FGM/C. MORE >
Glimmers of hope in the eastern Congo
Tupinge Ubakaji programme works to put an end to impunity for sexual violence in DRC. The programme supports survivors by providing medical, psycho-social, legal and judicial services, while ensuring their social and economic reintegration. MORE >
Supporting Mali's women to adapt to climate change
Climate change has led to more drought and shorter rainy seasons in Mali. The government has partnered with UNDP to strengthen agricultural communities and empower women to mitigate the social and economic impacts of climate change. MORE >
Removing the obstacles for women farmers
Through the Green Commodities Programme, UNDP is bringing together government, big business and small-scale farmers across 10 countries to address sustainable agricultural practices. The programme helps improve access to resources and ensure equal opportunities for women. MORE >
Female traditional leaders pave the way for fair representation
In South Sudan, law and order services are scarce at local level. Traditional courts are widely used to resolve civil matters and petty crimes, most commonly domestic issues such as adultery, domestic violence, debts, inheritance, and land disputes. MORE >


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Scott R. Galvin / AP
Mindy Morgan reads a note at the memorial where six teens were killed in a car crash on Park Ave. in Warren, Ohio on March 10.
An Ohio town was in mourning on Sunday after a single-car crash took the lives of six teenagers, the deadliest car accident the Buckeye State has seen in three years.
Around 7 a.m. local time, a sport utility vehicle carrying eight people in Warren, Ohio veered to the left, hit a guardrail and flew out of control, according to Ohio State Highway Patrol. The car came to rest in a pond, and only two of the teens were able to escape and find help.
A joyride in northeast Ohio ended tragically after an SUV slammed into a guard rail and flipped into a swamp, killing six teens inside. Two others were injured in the crash early Sunday morning.
Killed in the crash were 19-year-old Alexis Cayson, 14-year-old Andrique Bennett, 17-year-old Brandon Murray, and 15-year-olds Kirklan Behner, Daylan Ray, and Ramone White.
All the victims were from Warren, Ohio, about 60 miles east of Cleveland.
Brian Henry, 18, and Asher Lewis, 15, survived and were taken to a local hospital and later released.
Authorities say the Honda Passport was traveling at "highway speeds" when the driver hit the guard rail on a street where the speed limit is 35 mph. Some of the occupants were wearing seat belts, though it is unclear how many. The SUV only has five seats.
Tom Sheeran / AP
A Honda Passport that crashed into a guardrail and flipped over into a swampy pond Sunday morning in Warren, Ohio, killing six teenagers.
The teens were all friends, but investigators say it is still unclear where they were coming from or going to. At a press conference Sunday night, State Highway Patrol Lt. Brian Holt said, "none of the occupants of the vehicle had expressed permission to be in possession of the vehicle." The car's owner lives in nearby Youngstown, Ohio, though the automobile had not been reported stolen. Police said it is unclear at this time what the connection is between the vehicle owner and the teens.
Police also declined to speculate on drug use or alcohol pending the results of a toxicology report.
As news spread of crash, mourners throughout the community visited the scene of the accident to grieve. Along with the grief came questions of how it happened and why the victims were out at the early hour.
A local school where several of the teens attended was opened to the community to come for counseling. Counselors will be on hand Monday as well as students return from the weekend.
"It's going to be a rough week, a rough rest of the school year," said Michael Notar, Warren school superintendent.